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Wednesday, 27 June 2012

fairness! or a fair share

Lately
I've been thinking a lot, as over-thinkers are wont to do, about
value and time and money and the skewed relationship between the
three. It's a general preoccupation, but this has been a distinct
phase of it, and it kicked off at the end of May, on a magical day
when I saw the Alighiero
Boetti show
at Tate Modern and held hands with Lou
Brodie.

The
Boetti was delightful, the more so because I went with my
three-year-old, who can be a liability in galleries, but whose
imagination was snared by the patterns, disruptions, playfulness and
surprise of the work. Walking round, I was struck by how often the
information panels mentioned Boetti's love of wasting time, and of
time-consuming activity that was inefficient and uneconomical. He was
enough of a trickster that you could read his work as a spree of
pranks, pointless endeavour masquerading as Art. Although that hardly
accounts for the beauty of his extended gags: the biro
drawings,
line after line after line punctuated with white commas, each one a
twilit sky luminous with stars, are exquisite.

Dip
beneath the surface, though, and Boetti's time-wasting feels like a
radical political choice. Capitalism thrives when efficiency is
maximised; Boetti consistently undermined that. And with something
that feels like tenderness, too: a love of patient handicraft, and of
the human capacity for commitment and selflessness. Two rooms in
particular glowed with this, both filled with kilims woven by Afghan
women,
whose traditional craft ranks low in artistic hierarchies, and whose
societal status I'm guessing was lower still. One displayed abstract
rugs made
by refugees in Peshwar, based on grids drawn by art students; in the
other, brightly coloured maps
charted a world in flux, a world at the mercy of men's violence and
hunger for power, but also being reshaped by struggles for freedom.
Boetti's respect for the women he commissioned, the way he relished
the artistic choices they imposed on his work, made me adore him.

We missed the last piece of the show,
annoyingly, the self-portrait
sculpture of Boetti with a head
full of steam, because I didn't look at the map
properly and I didn't want to be late meeting theatre-artist Lou
Brodie. I'd encountered Lou before, in Nic Green's Trilogy,
although typically I failed to remember her, despite being haunted by
that show. Lou turns 30 this year, and is marking the occasion by
holding hands with someone for 30 minutes of every day in 2012. The
invitation came via Oval House, and mostly I offered up my hand for
it because something in me felt strangely provoked. In the playground
with my kids, I'm always struck by the way they take other children
by the hand: with shyness but a total lack of inhibition. Part of me
cherishes the memory of the last time I held hands with someone I had
a crush on (this is pre-marriage, now), the electric jolt that passed
from his fingers to mine. And I'm still vaguely troubled by the
unexpectedly challenging section in Uninvited
Guests' Love Letters Straight From Your Heart,
in which you have to maintain eye contact with a stranger for the
entirety of Roberta Flack's not short The
First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. I spent the
first half of it biting my lip with embarrassment, stifling giggles,
forcing myself not to squirm. But two or three minutes in, I melted.
I noticed that the eyes of the girl sitting opposite me were slightly
asymmetric, and that her pale skin was radiant in the dim light, and
I spent the final two minutes gazing at her through a romantic mist,
marvelling at her beauty.

There was an odd
moment of negotiation with Lou; we tried holding hands the way I hold
my children's, my hand on top, and it felt weird, so we switched to
how I hold my husband's, mine beneath. (And yes, there is a freaky
gender theory around this, to do with power and leadership in family
units.) Once we'd dealt with that, however, holding hands quickly
felt remarkably comfortable. I took her to a local nature garden
where we chatted about hand-holding in other cultures, how men in the
Middle East who are homophobic will hold hands with male friends
naturally and unconcernedly; the three occasions when Lou has
forgotten to hold hands, and what she might do with the experience
she's accruing; her work in Glasgow teaching drama to teenagers, and
why there aren't any relaxed dress-up-and-muck-about drama classes
for kids where I live. Meanwhile my son scampered cheerfully around
us and just once gently tried to prise our hands apart, not because
he wanted me but so he could lead Lou into a wilderness of meadow
flowers that tower above his head like a fairy-tale forest. When
Lou's alarm rang marking the end of the 30 minutes we kept holding
hands, because it felt odd not to, and when we let go the skin of my
palm tingled at the touch of the air.

What's stayed
with me most about the conversation is Lou's sense of her own
selfishness in making this ask of people. It's 30 whole minutes of
your time for the sake of one person's personally and artistically
self-indulgent daily practice. But is that time wasted? I don't think
so. To the extent that I'm always looking to escape from my own life,
I was grateful to Lou for the opportunity to do something other.
Generally, too, her practice is more altruistic than she gives
herself credit for. She allows you to stop. She encourages you to
attend to the needs of someone else, without expectation of
recompense. She reminds you that you and your time are valuable in
and of themselves. The reminder feels like a small but lovely gift –
and another denial of the capitalist ethic, where people are worth
only as much money as they're able to make and spend.

If
I'd written this while on holiday in Edinburgh, as I was supposed to,
this post would have ended right there. (Excellent idea, mutters a
readership, slinking away.) Instead I telephoned friends, read my new
cookbook (Tom Moggach's The
Urban Kitchen Gardener:
so far the gardening advice feels more useful to me than the recipes,
although after a first cook his version of cornbread, minus the
chilli, has already replaced Moosewood's
as my default), and spent several hours wading through the sea
of absurdity that is the fringe programme. I now have a
painstakingly detailed two-sheet timetable of far more shows than I
can possibly see. I came home feeling like a nitwit, because that
holiday put me behind with work on Chris Goode projects and Dialogue,
and got me sufficiently out of the habit of writing that for days
after sentences might as well have been skyscrapers for all my
ability to construct one. I go on and on about not wasting time, and
here I'd done a spectacularly good job of wasting heaps of it. (My
husband loathes this peevishness, rightly no doubt. It implies that
the time spent with family and friends is redundant, but I don't mean
that. I just want to have magic powers and be able to do everything.)

This
seethe of frustration followed me into the room on the night I saw
Kieran
Hurley's Hitch
and Gary
McNair's Crunch
at BAC. And what a balm they were: Hitch took my left hand, Crunch
took my right, and both squeezed just a little to reassure me that
however not OK things are and continue to be, we will fight and we
will support each other and we will be OK.

Hitch appeals to
the romantic in me: its fierce politics are expressed with
gentleness, generosity and, most of all, hope. For the friends I went
with, Hurley's hitch-hike from Glasgow to L'Aquila to take part in
demonstrations against the G8 summit in 2009 was essentially
pointless, because it didn't and couldn't achieve anything on a grand
political scale. (And one of them spoke with the authority of having
taken part in demonstrations against the G8 in Geneva in 2003.) But
to me that under-rates the value in demonstrating a sense of
community. Hurley's journey and the peaceful march he eventually,
against all odds, managed to join, may be only gestures, but they're
meaningful gestures that inspire faith in our collective humanity.

Still, Hurley is
the first person to admit doubt: far from shying away from negative
voices, he gives them full expression in the show, and as much as he
counters them, always there is a small part of him crushed by the
fear that the cynics, the exponents of selfishness, are right. But
then he tells us about the jazz musician who drove him all the way
from Paris to Bologna, and assured him that we can achieve anything
with will and honesty. And then he sees the mighty Patti Smith play
live, witnesses her fortify the demonstrators by roaring out The
People Have the Power. It's our choice: we can sit back and let it
all happen, or we can stand up and move against.

If
Hitch is an expression of idealism, Crunch is an exercise in
practical realism. Because what McNair proposes – a world in which
we put faith in human value, not financial value – is totally
achievable. And it certainly looks more viable than the other
alternative McNair suggests only to reject, a world of “richism”
in which everyone has equal financial security but continues to think
competitively and fearfully about money and each other. People need
no persuading of the value of money: it forces itself upon you every
time you want to buy something. Persuading people to stop
wanting is
another matter. What McNair does, brilliantly, is adopt the
repulsively smarmy persona of the low-grade salesman whose job it is
to filch large sums of cash from every soul he meets, and twist it to
fit his own socialist agenda. I know there have been shows in London
when cynical audiences have unanimously declined his invitation to
put their hard-earned cash through a shredding machine; glued to my
own chair, certain that my husband would loudly protest if I
proffered any of our money, even I felt a spasm of cynicism about the
four people who did answer the call, wondering whether the notes they
were clutching were single American dollars or defunct European
currencies. What a horribly unworthy thought.

I'm gullible by
nature, but I don't think my belief in Crunch is misplaced. It's the
belief of someone who shares McNair's vision of a more equitable
society, one founded in respect for people rather than in blind
worship of money, and wants to work to see that society grow.

As
an aside, in the energy rush that swooped me up post-Hitch/Crunch I
found myself thinking again about Three Kingdoms, and how different
that intoxication was from this one. Three Kingdoms was the
intoxication of punk nihilism: Churlish Meg caught
it brilliantly
when she said it made her want to smash windows (mild paraphrase).
Hitch/Crunch was the intoxication of punk creation, diverting energy
to positive not negative action. Unlike Meg, I
didn't miss the deer heads or the dildos.

Of course this
stuff followed me into the room when I went to see Boys at Soho a few
days later, but I didn't notice until the scene when one of the
characters is on the phone to the local council and the on-hold music
is Dire Straits' still-nauseating-after-all-these-years Money For
Nothing (let's not have a link, eh?). The song was McNair's intro
music for Crunch, and from that moment on I couldn't but watch Boys
through a Hitch/Crunch filter. I think I might have struggled with
Ella Hickson's characters anyway, simply because in my encroaching
middle-age I am developing a more horribly pious than ever allergic
reaction to watching 24-hour party people guzzle drugs, no matter how
much I sympathise with the underlying desire for escape and
self-oblivion. But I struggled with them all the more because the
worldview they articulate feels so abhorrent to me.

That makes the
worldview sound one-dimensional, but it isn't, quite. In the red
corner sits idealistic, kind-hearted, hand-wringing Benny, the figure
I'm most like, right down to the pious resistance to drugs. In the
blue corner stands hard-hearted, knuckles-clenched Mack, who scoffs
at Benny's belief in public services, communal responsibility and
social decency and aggressively declaims a laissez-faire politic of
selfish individualism, not least to mask his own fears about the
future. The fact that it's Benny who inadvertently proves the most
destructive of the two surreptitiously plants the thought that Mack
might be right.

Boys shares with
Mike Bartlett's Love,
Love, Love the knowledge that the baby boomers have created an
impossible world in which the odds are stacked against every
succeeding generation. Watching the final scene of Love, Love, Love
at the Royal Court – which I did love, quite a lot – my
sympathies were with the daughter: yes, she's ridiculous, but who
wouldn't be with such pampered, self-absorbed parents, and absolutely
they should use some of their accumulated wealth to buy her a flat.
What annoyed me about Love, Love, Love was how grotesque the parents
were in that pampered self-absorption. A friend of mine didn't like
the play at all because the parents were unrealistic to her. To me,
they were entirely realistic, but so extreme that Bartlett's
real-life targets wouldn't recognise themselves. Somewhere in the
journey to the Royal Court stage, the play's poisoned arrow lost its
tip.

My problem with
Boys was deeper and knottier. It unsettled me to such a
disproportionate degree that within five minutes of arriving home I
was arguing lividly with my husband, who told me I shouldn't see
these things if they're going to upset me so much. Some of that was
simply exorcising my anger at the characterisation of Benny, who
combines a sense of entitlement with a kind of smug,
self-congratulatory resignation. In the muddled triumph of the final
scene, he sets about cleaning up the mess that has accumulated in the
flat and it's thuddingly clear that this is meant to be a metaphor
for how he must sort out the ills of the world. Only it strikes me
that Benny fundamentally accepts the world as it is. He makes noises
about joining protests and making a stand, but he doesn't seem to be
asking for fairness so much as for his generation to get their fair
share.

But it wasn't
just anger. Boys tapped into jagged student memories and unresolved
family issues, and raised again the impossible questions of what it
is to be the daughter of self-made immigrants who built up their own
business, and how different my life might be if various actions in my
20s hadn't been guided by a desire for security. Above all, it struck
repeatedly and unerringly at my guilt reflex. It's really easy to
pronounce against money when you live in an nice house and can pay
off your credit card bill every month. It's a lot easier to silence
wants when the needs are fully covered. Boys made me feel like a
hypocrite, for failing to live it like I talk it.

“We go back
and forth between despair and hope. Are we crazy to rebel or is there
some real force in our drive against capitalism? … [This] insoluble
dilemma … is not composed of external forces but has to do with the
organisation of our own practice. We create the society that we want
to get rid of. That is terrible, but it is also the source of hope.
If we create capitalism, then we can also stop creating it and do
something else instead.” John Holloway, Crack Capitalism, of
course. And this is where the thinking about time and value and money
keeps coming back: to the idea of doing and thinking beyond money, to
valuing pursuits that deny the importance of money, to spending time
elsewhere and otherwise.

The usefulness
of plays like Love, Love, Love and Boys for me is less in what they
tell me about the generations between which I am caught, and more in
what they remind me I must do as a mother. I'm pleased to say that,
unlike the parents in Love, Love, Love, I'm yet to make the heinous
mistake of moving to Reading, or of praising my children's innate
brilliance as opposed to their hard work. Less flippantly, I feel
terrified by the disappointment I'm setting my kids up for, the sense
of entitlement I'm engendering in them, merely by raising them in a
nice house in which they – despite their incessant and infuriating
arguments to the contrary – want for nothing. Always I'm faced with
the essentially conservative nature of their upbringing. Teaching
them that there might be other ways of living is going to be a fight,
but my sleeves are rolled up and I'm ready for it.

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a bit about me

Some of the things I cram into my too-short days: writing about art and music for the Guardian; collaborating as critic-in-residence with Chris Goode and Company; rethinking what it means to be a theatre critic as part of Dialogue, a collaboration with Jake Orr; thinking about audience development as part of Fuel's New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood strand; dancing with the Actionettes; drawing, baking cakes, making clothes (a lot less of all of those these days); struggling to bring up two not-so-small-any-more children; daydreaming a different world; writing it all down here...